Russell Banks - Cloudsplitter

Father dried himself deliberately and said nothing. He looked at me, and I saw his boiling rage. Then he passed the drying cloth to me.

“If we helped anyone named Cannon, and I don’t recall that we did, but if we did, then my son and I did it alone,” Father said. “Wilkinson is a liar.”

Marshal Saunders said that he was looking for a slim, dark Negro man in his twenties and a heavy-set mulatto man in his fifties with a full beard. “I’m going to assume, Mister Brown, that you and your son here didn’t have no notion that the coloreds from Virginia was murderers, all right? And you thought you was only helping a couple of escaped slaves scoot through to Canada, that’s all. Just as was the case with Mister Wilkinson down there at Tahawus. And I don’t consider him a liar, sir. I realize that you all were only doing what you thought was your Christian duty. Your Negro associates, however, probably knew better. They have their little secrets that they keep from us,” he said sourly. He believed that they probably knew where the Cannons were hiding. His aim was to cut a deal with our friends. The same deal, he said, that he was cutting with us. If they could give him some small help in locating the Cannons, then he wouldn’t press charges against anyone up here in North Elba. “They’re free niggers, far as I’m concerned, and that’s how I’ll treat them, so long’s they do the same as you and give me a bit of help in performing my duties as a federal officer of the law. You understand what I’m telling you, Mister Brown?”

Father stared up at the man in silence. The horses shifted their weight, sweating under the sun. “Certainly I understand,” he finally said. “But I will not help you, sir. My son and I, if indeed we did help some poor Negro slaves escape from the evil clutches of some Southern slavemaster — a man who may well have deserved to die anyhow, since well-treated slaves rarely risk the rigors of flight — then we did so on our own.” The burden of proof lay with the marshal, Father pointed out, and he believed that giving a stranger in a strange land a ride in your wagon was not yet illegal in the state of New York.

Well, yes, the marshal agreed. It was a gray area of the law, a person might say. Father would benefit everyone concerned, however, himself included, if he saw fit to aid the law. The marshal rolled his head slowly on his shoulders, as if his neck were stiff and this were a casual conversation. The two deputies kept their right hands open and close to the handles of their revolvers.

Father said, “You don’t know who you’re looking for, except on Mister Wilkinson’s perjured say-so. And I can’t help you, and if I could, I’ll tell you frankly, sir, I wouldn’t. Find your Negroes on your own,” he snapped, and he turned and walked towards the house.

“It could all unravel on you, Brown!” the marshal called after. “I might bring Wilkinson himself up here, so’s he can identify the two niggers for me, and when it comes to saving their own dusky skins, who knows what them fellows’ll say then?”

Father wheeled and glared at him. “Do as you wish! Bring Satan up from hell, if you Like, and have him pick a pair of Negroes from the crowd for you. I’ll not help with work like this!”

The three turned their horses abruptly then and rode out of the yard, and without looking back, they galloped down the road towards the settlement. A moment later, when I went inside the house, I found Father already seated, still shirtless, at his writing table, furiously scratching out a letter.

“Who are you writing to?” I asked him.

“John and Jason.”

“In Springfield? And Ohio?”

“Yes, of course!”

“They may not be there now!’ I said. “They might’ve already left for here.” Barely a week before, a letter from John had arrived, saying, among other cheering things, that he and Jason intended soon to come up to North Elba for a short visit, to see the place and the family and to settle a few business matters with Father that could best be discussed in person.

“All the better. But in case they haven’t, this will bring them promptly.” He blotted the letter and passed it over to me to read.

Come hither at once, boys, and come armed, for we need to snatch a few poor creatures from out of the mouth of Satan before he devours them! A proper show of Christian force and clear intent to rain fire down upon the heads of these local malefactors and hypocrites ought to clarify matters here, leastways enough so that we can continue doing the Lord’s work and help bring about the downfall of slavery by making it too costly to maintain against the combined wills of white Christians and of the desperate, courageous slaves themselves. Come hither to North Elba now, my sons! Come and stand with us as true, courageous, righteous Soldiers of the Lord! Your loving father,

John Brown

I pointed out that it might be ten days or two weeks before they received his summons, and the whole affair could well have blown over by then. “And besides,”I said, “they might’ve already left Springfield to come here anyhow. Why bother writing this at all?”

Father looked up at me with an expression that flowed from puzzlement to slight disgust. “Owen, sometimes I think…,” he said, then began again. “Owen, I sometimes believe that you must become a hotter man than you are.” And with a little wave of dismissal, he returned to his letter, signed it, and placed it into an envelope and sealed it for mailing.

I stood by the window for a moment and, peering out at the mountains, saw that it was clouding up in the west to rain. I felt weary, almost dizzy, from two sleepless nights and ached in my bones for rest and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a day and a night. But I knew I could not do that yet. I pulled on a shirt and trudged from the house, across the yard towards the field, to help the family bring in the hay. Scythe in hand, I crossed the road, and as I neared the others, I heard rapid hoofbeats behind me and, turning, saw Father ride out. He was headed towards the village to get his letter into the afternoon post to Westport, whence it would make its slow way south to Massachusetts, and the sight of the man, wrapped in haste and single-mindedness and rage, fatigued me now beyond all imagining. It nearly repelled me.

A short ways beyond, bent over in the field, was the rest of my family — my stepmother and sisters in starched bonnets like white flower-tops and my brothers under the shade of their straw hats working with their backs to me and against the wind that riffled across the field of yellow hay, flattening and silvering it in the fading afternoon light. They seemed at such peace with the world, so at ease with themselves, that I envied them and, momentarily weak and guilty, my conscience enflamed by Father’s example and his cruel remark, felt cut off from them, as if I were a member of a completely different family.

There followed then a rapid succession of events, one leading swiftly to the next, and it seemed at the time that there was nothing we or anyone else could do to stop or deflect them. First, that same evening, when Father returned from posting his letter, he came all boiling with unusual rage. The family, me included, was at the table, eating supper, when he galloped into the yard on his poor old tired Morgan horse, strode into the house, and poured out his story in a torrent of words, shocking us with the ferocity of his anger and frightening the younger children. Sputtering and spitting, he bore us the news that when Marshal Saunders had earlier interrogated us, he had lied. It was a lie of omission, but a heinous lie nonetheless, Father declared, for the marshal had not told us that he had brought Mr. Wilkinson along with him and that he had kept the man hidden down the road a ways from the farm. Loud talk of murder and lying federal law officers and hypocrisy, of revenge and bloody rebellion, of laying about with the jawbone of an ass and chopping off the heads of serpents — we were used to that from Father. But here, tonight, in our farmhouse kitchen, our domestic sanctuary seemed to have been invaded for the first time, and the calls to violence were no longer made with regard to some distant or even imaginary place and time. They were more than metaphorical. Father wanted blood, real blood, and he wanted it now.